May 13, 2012

Google Rumored To Be Considering Meebo Acquisition

Google is reportedly in talks to purchase social platform and instant messaging client developer Meebo, a pair of sources close to the situation told All Things D reporter Liz Gannes on Friday.

One of the sources told Gannes that the price for the seven-year-old, Mountain View, California-based technology company could be upwards of $100 million. Meebo CEO Seth Strenberg did not respond to her request for comment on the story, while a Google representative told Gannes that the company could not comment on rumors or speculation.

VentureBeat writer Matt Marshall said that a possible Google acquisition of Meebo "makes sense," as two years ago "Meebo gained Google´s favor by helping push a web standard called XAuth , which let users come to sites and use whatever social network they liked, not just the all-pervasive Twitter and Facebook. At the time, this helped publishers promote second-tier players like Google, which was trying to promote Google Buzz."

"Meebo boasts on its front page that it is helping users create 'interest profiles.' Of course, targeting – and socially driven targeting at that – is exactly what Google needs to boost its Google Plus efforts. And it´s also something that Meebo doesn´t seem ready to pull off by itself, given Facebook´s dominance in this area. Add to that Meebo´s team of 173 people, many of them engineers, but many also many with solid media and marketing backgrounds attractive to Google´s advertising DNA. It looks like a very nice match," he added.

Meebo, which was founded in 2005 with the launch of their first piece of software, a browser-based IM app dubbed Meebo Messenger that remains in use today, said Mashable's Lauren Indvik. Since then, it has raised more than $62 million in financing, including $25 million in 2010, and has "developed an expanding suite of social and mobile apps for consumers as well as publishers, each designed to enable online communication," she added.

Edward Moyer of CNET describes Meebo Messenger as a piece of software that "emulates services like Yahoo IM but requires no downloading or installation. Developers can create applications and services to run on the architecture, and the service also provides 'Rooms' designed to make it easy to share media and Web sites."